[UA] RE: Negative Skills?

[nick wedig]

> I'd be inclined to say there's a point at which he buys a
> consolidated stat
> called "Expert in Renaissance Languages" whose penumbra covers a
> couple of
> languages. 

Sure, why not?  Isn't that what player defined skills are for: creating
exactly what they want?

If you're concerned that knowing six skills would be more useful than
taking "Spanish 30%", don't be.  You're the GM, and your job is to make
both skills equally useful.  Which would be that hard.  Each session or
two the Renaissance scholar might use one of his dead languages to
translate and ancient grimoire, but the guy who just knows one language
constantly runs into NPCs who speak that language, or the evil NPC cult
used that language for all _their_ scrolls and stuff.  Or after the PC
takes the skill in Spanish, you make a South American (or wherever)
drug running cartel into a major NPC group for the game.

Even if the skills overlap, so that the scholar also knows Spanish, the
skill penumbra comes into effect: knowing a bunch of languages means
you know less about each one (for the same skill value).  So the
language scholar can speak Spanish, but knows fewer Spanish speaking
NPCs, knows less about the customs and culture of Mexico and has more
trouble finding a good Mexican restaurant.



And being a linguist is about studying language in general, not about
knowing a lot of languages.  If speaking a language is like flying a
type of plane, then each new language is like flying a different type
of plane (airliner, jet, etc), with weird languages being other flying
things: helicopters, hot air balloons, gliders, whatever.  In this
analogy, then, being a linguist is like being a scientist studying _the
physics of flight_.  Knowing how to fly will help the scientist do
science, and knowing the physics will help the pilot, but these are two
different things.  General and theoretical versus specific and
practical.

Mr. Teapot
monolinguist

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